IT GreenWire: GID-Quantor's green IT solution – helping you store your data more efficiently
2nd February 2012
GID-Quantor Ltd, established in 1993, was formerly part of the imaging systems division of NCR Limited and since 2002 has been part of the GID Group (also formally part of NCR) which has operations in Europe and North America.
We deliver a range of
IT solutions; including OnBase
electronic content management (ECM) and
workflow systems, now used by over 10,000 organisations worldwide and confirmed by Gartner as a 'leader' in electronic content management.
A key to the success of OnBase has been its Application Enabler, which allows for existing
IT applications, including older legacy systems, to be 'image enabled’ quickly (in just hours) without the need for new coding. Such applications can then deliver the benefits of ECM and document workflow to users, while still allowing them to work within their existing and familiar applications. This assists the organisations concerned to become greener by reducing paper reporting from such older systems.
Our very latest green solution is Silent Cubes. This is a very different, albeit non-proprietary solution that IT management can use to tackle today’s challenge of ever increasing data volumes and longer data retention periods.
Today, even with improved server efficiency, use of virtualisation and de-duplication 'back-up’ and 'recovery’ data is sometimes confused with 'archive’ data and a lot of data is perceived to be 'mission’ or 'business’ critical. Therefore instead of a possible 20 per cent 'active’ / 80 per cent 'archive’ data split some IT centres have an 80 per cent 'active’ / 20 per cent 'archive’ split, with many organisations having multiple servers 'spinning’ 24 hours a day with vast volumes of data, much of which is likely to be accessed only infrequently, if at all.
By comparison, the designers of Silent Cubes (FAST LTA) say that across hundreds of users in different vertical markets, the average access rate for data 'archived’ to Silent Cubes is only four per cent per annum – i.e. for every 100 terabytes (TB) of data archived, on average only 4 TBs are accessed in any 12 month period.
Silent Cubes is designed to give users the very highest possible security for their long-term archive data (i.e. more secure than fully mirrored RAID-6 storage) and because each Cube uses very little power (i.e. less than two watts in standby and 125 watts in store/retrieve mode) and no air-conditioning is required the system also delivers savings of up to 93 per cent in both energy usage and carbon footprint.
Each data Cube is less than one cubic foot and stores up to 16 fully useable Terabytes of data and systems are fully scalable to multiple Petabyte volumes.
Silent Cubes protects all data against loss, deletion or overwriting, has in-built quadruple redundancy, a full data replication option and is certified as compliant for long-term revision-safe storage.
For more information contact:
GID-Quantor Limited,
Highlands Farm Business Park,
West Sussex,
